More scientific evidence of deep-lying racial differences: "A common genetic mutation may explain why Asian heart patients are less likely than others to get relief from chest pain when they take nitroglycerin, a new Chinese study finds. Fudan University researchers examined 111 coronary heart disease patients who were self-administering nitroglycerin under the tongue whenever they experienced an acute angina attacks. Eighty (72 percent) of the patients reported that they had pain relief within 10 minutes of taking the nitroglycerin, while the remainder of the patients experienced no pain relief. The researchers found that many of the patients who didn't respond to nitroglycerin had an inactive mutant form of the ALDH2 gene. This mutant version is called ALDH2*2. In order for nitroglycerin to be effective, a patient's body has to be able to convert the nitroglycerin into nitric oxide. This process requires ALDH2. It's estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of the Asian population has the ALDH2*2 mutation. This information needs to be considered when doctors recommend nitroglycerin for Asian patients, the study authors said".

There are even big genetic racial differences in earwax! "It is not a subject scientists generally wax about. But a seven-page scientific paper published today is solely devoted to the genetics of earwax. Human earwax comes in two varieties -- wet and dry. According to the journal Nature Genetics, dry earwax is seen in up to 95 per cent of East Asians, but no more than 3 per cent of Europeans and Africans. The reason for the difference is a gene called ABCC11 which controls earwax-altering molecules. A 39-strong international team did the research. The role of earwax was unclear, said the scientists. "Insect trapping, self-cleaning and prevention of dryness of the external auditory canal are its plausible functions," they wrote. Armpit (axillary) odour was associated with wet-type earwax, raising the possibility that earwax might be involved in sexual attraction."

Anybody who has ever heard of radiation hormesis will not be as surprised as these doctors were

Lung cancer patients were given new hope yesterday, thanks to an Australian breakthrough... The good news came in the form of a study published in the journal Cancer which found that low doses of radiation, given every weekday for one or two weeks, could improve outcomes for non-small-cell lung cancer. The cancer was one of the deadliest and most common forms of lung cancer, according to radiation oncologist Michael Mac Manus from Melbourne's Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

Associate Prof Mac Manus and his colleagues were amazed to find that some patients with advanced tumours lived for as long as five years with the new treatment. Usually they would have been expected to live less than six months. "All experienced doctors will have come across an occasional case where a patient has survived for a long time when they shouldn't have, so we thought we would look at a very large database of patients with incurable lung cancer to see how many of them survived," Prof Mac Manus said. "We were surprised to find that 1.1 per cent survived for five years. Some of them survived for 10 years and (one of) the patients appears to have been cured. "The long-term survival was an unexpected effect of the radiotherapy. "We expected it to be virtually zero."

The study looked at more than 2000 patients diagnosed with lung cancer who were at such an advanced stage their illness was considered incurable. All had received low doses of radiation to relieve pain and other symptoms but the average survival for such patients was generally less than six months. Prof Mac Manus was "very surprised and amazed" to find about one-in-100 actually lived for five years or more after radiotherapy.

He was now hoping to extend the research by comparing the molecular biology and genetics of the tumours in a bid to identify in advance the patients most likely to survive with less intensive treatment. "If we can understand what the mechanism is, we might be able to develop some new treatments based on that," he said. Although more research was needed, he said cancer specialists might be reluctant to leave radiation out of the treatment package for late-stage lung cancer patients in future because of the findings. "The bottom line is that even patients generally considered as having incurable disease have some hope," Prof Mac Manus said.

Some more detail is coming out about recent discussions by and with the Pope on the possibility of reform within Islam. This article has links to other articles discussing the debate the Pope's comments have kicked up. In sum the earlier brief note on this blog that the Pope seems to believe reform of Islam is not impossible, but nonetheless likely to be exceedingly difficult, (in other words, "don't hold your breath") would seem to hold. Interestingly this later Chiesa report indicates that if reform is to come it is likely to be from areas such as Turkey, Indonesia or from Western Muslims. The labelling of 'so called' Western countries is also interesting, ...is this a tacit acknowledgement that parts of Europe are no longer in the West? Eurabia? Key excerpt:

"The Holy Father is well-informed enough to know that there have existed and that there exist today, probably increasingly, other interpretations of the Qur'anic evidence with regard to a theology of revelation. These considered Muslim views and approaches do not (yet?), it would seem, inform the thinking and approach of a sizable Islamic movement or organisation - and we do not know what future problems lie ahead in this regard - but it does exist and is vividly discussed in many places, both in academia and beyond.

"An open debate on these matters does not yet seem to be possible within the Arab world but Turkish and Indonesian society grant relatively more room for airing and discussing such ideas, and the so-called Western countries offer even more space".

Steven Spielberg and George Clooney on how hard it is being super-brave billionaire liberal parrots speaking truth to power in a society of neoconservative oppression:

SPIELBERG: I think we all have been given our marching orders ... Maybe I shouldn't get into this. [Pause] I just feel that filmmakers are much more proactive since the second Bush administration. I think that everybody is trying to declare their independence and state their case for the things that we believe in. No one is really representing us, so we're now representing our own feelings, and we're trying to strike back.

So Bush has been good for film?

SPIELBERG: I wouldn't just say Bush. The whole neo-conservative movement.

CLOONEY: Because it's polarizing. I'm not going to sit up and say, "This is how you should think." But let's at least acknowledge that there should be an open debate, and not be told that it's unpatriotic to ask questions.

I will give $100 dollars to anyone who can produce a verifiable instance where either Spielberg or Clooney were told by an authority figure that they couldn't make their wildly inaccurate, anti-historical pieces of celluloid garbage, because the pretentious little shits were just too much of a "danger to the system".

The interview wasn't a total waste. Here's the director of gay groupthink movie Brokeback Mountain, admitting that the liberal agenda is now the Hollywood mainstream:

CLOONEY: From the end of the first wave of the civil-rights movement, all the way through Watergate, people were constantly talking about what was going on in the country. Now it seems that's happening again. You can sit in a room and have people talk about politics—in Los Angeles, of all places.

LEE: There seems to be a collective social consciousness.

Clooney really means that it's okay to sit around and bash Bush in Los Angeles. Can you imagine the flow of the conversation if you sat some really articulate and intelligent conservative down with these mentally-stunted peacocks? Clooney would hang around about as long as I sat through Oceans 12.

Finally, there is another wonderful (yet completely unintentional) admission from Spielberg - Mr "I would die for Israel" - that his film Munich is intentionally biased against the conservative perspective, and that he never expected his fellow progressives to be offended by it:

Did you expect the political reaction to "Munich" to be this heated?

SPIELBERG: I knew we were going to receive a volley from the right. I was surprised that we received a much smaller, but no less painful, volley from the left. It made me feel a little more aware of the dogma, and the Luddite position people take any time the Middle East is up for discussion.

So many fundamentalists in my own community, the Jewish community, have grown very angry at me for allowing the Palestinians simply to have dialogue and for allowing Tony Kushner to be the author of that dialogue. "Munich" never once attacks Israel, and barely criticizes Israel's policy of counterviolence against violence. It simply asks a plethora of questions. It's the most questioning story I've ever had the honor to tell. For that, we were accused of the sin of moral equivocation. Which, of course, we didn't intend—and we're not guilty of.

That was, of course, complete bullshit. Had he really set out to make a non-partisan film which didn't take sides, he should have expected to cop flak from both political extremes. That he expected it solely from the right says one thing - this was a film whose central goal was to indict Israel for defending itself.

Israelis are upset that Tony Kushner is the one Spielberg chose to be the author of the Palestinian "dialogue"? I wonder why? Could it be his publicly-stated position on Israel?

“I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity…. I wish modern Israel hadn’t been born.”

Or could it be that his portrayal of those Palestinians is a hagiography? His terrorists are sweet, loving fathers of adorable little children whom the evil Israeli agents forever tear them away from. We catch no glimpse of the many Israeli children who lost their fathers in Munich, or those in Israel itself. Fathers who were ordinary civilians who played no part in any "oppression" of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinians who Kushner portrays are men who are unlike the Israeli operatives in one important way - and this is how Kushner reveals his otherwise hidden admiration for the terrorists. While the Israeli operatives sink deeper into fits of depression and self-loathing the more terrorists they kill, the Palestinian terrorists themselves, men who have slaughtered (or caused to be slaughtered) dozens of Israeli civilians (as opposed to the Israelis who strictly only kill terrorists) have no trouble sleeping at night. They aren't shown suffering any fits of self-doubt. These are men who would have killed Jewish children in their lifetimes, and they don't bat an introspective eyelid.

Why does Kushner do this? Simple. He believes that the Palestinian cause is just, and the Israeli one unjust. That is why he can show terrorists who suffer none of the guilt that so vividly tears at the soul of the Israelis.

In Kushner's twisted mind, the innocent Israelis who the Palestinians kill have it coming. The terrorists themselves do not. Why else would he show the Israeli assassins actually weeping over their part in the elimination of terrorists who - if allowed to live - would merely go on killing dozens of Israeli citizens?

No, we are forced to draw this conclusion, because the only other one left open to us - that the Israeli men are emotional weaklings; lesser men than the terrorists they face is (hopefully) below even a cheap propagandist like Kushner.

Dialogue? I think not. Spielberg and Kushner both deserve to be beaten to bloody pulps for this gross insult to some very brave men who dared to do what self-loathing, weakling Jews like they will never do - actually do something which might involve their dying for Israel, and not merely talking about it in empty platitudes, from the safety of a sound stage in California.

This post will encourage Leftists to shriek "racist" and "Nazi" at me but they regularly shriek that at GWB and heaps of other conservatives so I am going to disregard such shrieks as devalued currency.

I grew up with Aborigines (Australian native blacks) in my class at school and I have seen plenty of them since -- particularly as a landlord (Yes. I HAVE let rooms and houses to them. Racists do that, you know) -- so I think I know a bit about them. And if you are looking for "cultural" differences, Aborigines must be as different from people of Northern European ancestry as you can get. And the reason why is that they were isolated in Australia from other populations for up to 60,000 years (on some estimates). So they evolved separately. And they evolved to suit Australia as it originally was. And the abilities they evolved -- particularly a remarkable capacity for observing and remembering minute details of the landscape -- do in some ways leave the rest of us for dead. In other ways, however, they are badly lacking in what is needed to fit into modern Western society -- a strikingly poor ability to plan ahead being their most obvious handicap. They very much "live for the day".

One thing I have always envied them is their ability to relax. They can sit around under a tree all day happily doing exactly nothing. I, however, am one of those instinctively hard-driving people who is genetically from the far North of the world. And the fact that, in my retirement, I post daily to seven blogs of my own and contribute frequently to four group blogs is, I think, some testimony to that. It is as hard for me to sit back and do nothing as it is easy for Aborigines. But yesterday I managed it. Just as Aborigines often do, I spent the whole day sitting around and doing practically nothing other than some intermittent chatting. Anne accompanied me in this experience, of course. She is probably more full of beans than I am these days, however, so she caved in first and shot off to do something at about 7pm. She spent many years as a remote-area nurse working with (and getting on with) Aborigines so knows them even better than I do. So she knew all about the model I had in mind when I said we were having an Aborigine day. She enjoyed it but she couldn't keep it up! Genetics will out.

The world's most politically-correct police chief has done it again: Sir Ian Blair wondered out loud why the murder of two little girls by a sex-maniac and his girlfriend became such big news in Britain. Could it be that the sex-murder of two little girls was intrinsically newsworthy or that it took a lot of public assistance before the culprits were tracked down? Could it be the horror of a woman assisting with the crime? No way! It was "racism" according to Blair. So the victims were black? No. They were white. It was the fact that they were white that made it big news, according to Blair. If they were black, people would have ignored it, apparently. So the murder of whites is unusual and blacks get murdered all the time? No. There are nearly five times as many whites as blacks murdered in Britain every year.

In other words, Blair is looking for racism under every bed. He sees it everywhere and uses it to explain things that are more obviously explained in other ways. Just on the law of averages alone, it would have been more likely that the most publicly noted kiling would be of a white, because there are so many more whites killed. And in any case, it is not true that only the killing of whites gets a lot of publicity. The killing of Victoria Climbie by her relatives also got a lot of publicity and that little girl was black. Clearly, it is the police chief himself who is race-obsessed, not ordinary Britons. More details here

I don't mean that she's going to be shot, or simply take a tumble down the stairs, although I would count either of the two misfortunes a profound blessing.

No, Mother Sheehan is about to be annihilated... by the media.

No, I don't mean Fox, although I'm sure Sean Hannity will increase his smugness factor. I mean the liberal media, and by liberal media, I mean the rest of the media. All of them - with the possible exception of far, far, far leftist moonbat rags - will soon abandon their support for Sheehan and instead start to work toward her downfall.

How do I know this relatively unlikely turn of events is about to occur?

CARACAS, Venezuela - Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist who set up camp near President Bush's Texas ranch last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record) to protest what she called the California lawmaker's support for the war in Iraq.

"She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won't call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops," Sheehan told The Associated Press in an interview while attending the World Social Forum in Venezuela along with thousands of other anti-war and anti-globalization activists.

"I think our senator needs to be held accountable for her support of George Bush and his war policies," said Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Feinstein's campaign manager, Kam Kuwata, said the senator "doesn't support George Bush and his war policies."

"She has stated publicly on numerous occasions that she felt she was misled by the administration at the time of the vote," Kuwata said by phone from California.

But with troops committed, Feinstein believes immediate withdrawal is not a responsible option, Kuwata said.

"Senator Feinstein's position is, let's work toward quickly turning over the defense of Iraq to Iraqis so that we can bring the troops home as soon as possible," he said.

Sheehan accused Feinstein of being out of touch with Californians on the issue.

She said she would decide whether to run after talking with her three other adult children. The Democratic primary will be held in June, and candidates must submit their statements for the voter guide by Feb. 14.

Kuwata said Feinstein and Sheehan appear to have a fundamental disagreement over whether troops should be pulled out right now. "That's why they have elections, and if she decides to file (paperwork to run), so be it," he said.

The media may be biased, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't all raving mad. They aren't going to abandon this lefty for this one.

Feinstein is a Democrat stalwart and has a dead lock on San Francisco. Get a load of her resume and tell me if you think that the press will slam her in order to help Sheehan, a woman who derives her "absolute moral authority" solely from the dead soldier son whose corpse she uses as a platfrom from which to harangue the country her son died for.

If she really starts to look like she has a chance, they'll destroy her. Just sit back with me, watch, and laugh.

.... Malcolm Kerr, a Liberal MP whose seat is Cronulla, says he's had a stream of constituents come into his office complaining of inaction by the police on revenge attacks despite what they said was clear evidence.

Some locals may have believed [police chief] Moroney when he said the lack of video evidence was the problem. "When the video turned up with that guy being attacked, it blew that out of the water," Kerr says. And, says Kerr, the fact that Iemma announced a huge increase in officers for Enoggera shows he did not take the issue seriously enough at the outset. "If the Government now says the task needs much greater resources, they should have put them in at the start five weeks earlier, when the clues were still hot," Kerr says.

Iemma and Moroney still say the police have not been soft on Middle Eastern crime. But the evidence suggests otherwise. A notorious police document outlines how, the night after the Sunday riots, "numerous vehicles were sighted congregated in the vicinity of Punchbowl Park [in Sydney's inner southwest]". "These vehicles and the crowd that had been gathered were suspected to be Middle Eastern criminals who have been involved in malicious damage and civil disobedience offences throughout the Sutherland Shire and St George areas," the document says. "A direction was given to police around midnight not to enter the area and antagonise these persons."

According to former police officers, it's not unusual. The police don't take on Lebanese gangs. But Debnam has not provided any evidence to back up his assertion that the Government specifically ordered the police to go soft on Middle Eastern crime. He has also failed to put up any proof that Middle Eastern political power brokers in the ALP are exerting influence on the Government to do so. Debnam's critics say his allegation is like saying that because his well-heeled electorate of Vaucluse, in Sydney's eastern suburbs, is largely Anglo-Saxon, he would be under pressure to go soft on Anglo-Saxon crime. Debnam agrees that the overwhelming majority of the Middle Eastern community has no interest in keeping the gangs out of jail. "Whenever I go out to those electorates and door-knock, all they say, whether they come from a Middle Eastern background or any other, is that they want the Government to crack down on crime," he says.

However, some former police officers, such as former police assistant commissioner and ministerial adviser Geoff Schuberg, say that, leaving the wilder elements of Debnam's conspiracy theory aside, there are some real reasons why the police are soft on Middle Eastern crime. One is politicisation of the police force in which police commissioners are less independent from ministers, and police are nervous right down the line of doing something that could be seen as politically incorrect or lead to a complaint of racial targeting. Schuberg says Moroney could stand up more to the gangs and the Government. "As a police commissioner you need to be a bit of a mongrel and give firm direction," he says. "I don't see that in Ken."

A second factor put forward by Schuberg, and well-known former detective Tim Priest, is that the skills inculcated in police officers have shifted from an emphasis on old-fashioned street policing to a more cerebral curriculum stressing socially conscious policing. "The old school of police of the past has been replaced with academics, who haven't the stomach," Priest says.

The third factor, Schuberg and Priest say, is plain fear of Lebanese gangs that, they say, have absolutely no respect for police, threaten to harm their families and have weapons they are quite prepared to use.

Some community leaders say the situation has highlighted the deep suspicion of governments and authority by many people of Middle Eastern background whose families have come from countries where governments are either corrupt or unreliable. "There is an old Arabic saying, 'Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world'," says one Lebanese leader. Randa Kattan, the executive director of the Arab Council Australia, believes there was possibly some underlying frustration that spilt over during the revenge attacks. "There is a lot of frustration in the community," she says. "They have had a lot to deal with since the rape stories [referring to infamous court cases]. It is a daily reality grappling with public opinion about Middle Eastern people and it won't go away very soon." ....

Tensions between Lebanese and whites at Cronulla are not new. Jane Tozen tells of an incident she witnessed well before the riots. It was December 7, and the mercury hit 38C at around 4.15pm, when she had just finished her regular routine in the gym of the North Cronulla surf lifesaving club. She and a couple of mates were looking out the window at a TV crew filming on the beach. But another group caught their eye. "There was a group of Lebanese hanging around the shower area," Tozen tells Inquirer. "They were mouthing off at one of the locals. Then they attacked him. He fell to the ground. He was covering his head. They were like flies, they were around him and kicking the shit out of him. A second local went in to help him and he was beaten, too. Then a lot of locals came round and there was a bit of a stand-off."

Lifesavers in the club called the police. The first car took 15 minutes to arrive and when it did the lone officer chased one of the Lebanese men. "I'm told he ran like hell and jumped over a fence," the new Task Force Enoggera commander Ken McKay tells Inquirer. "It was quite a chase. We got the PolAir helicopter in but he got away."

According to Tozen, the Lebanese man snatched a bag and ran, deliberately to allow the others to leave the scene uninterviewed. It was another 45 minutes, according to Tozen, before the police arrived in force. The two injured local men, streaming blood, had been treated at the surf club and had left. By that time some of the Lebanese had drifted back. According to Tozen, she and other witnesses pointed out the perpetrators to police. "They didn't arrest any of them," Tozen says.

"We told them the numberplates, which had these really gross words like Hot & Wet. The police did nothing, they just let them walk away. "It should all have been on high-quality video, because the television crew had turned its attention to the attack and filmed it. Everyone saw them do it. They told the police." But according to Tozen, the police did not act. She was wondering whether to go to the media, but her surf-lifesaving club banned members from speaking to journalists. (Tozen is not her real name - her fear is not of the Lebanese, but in being expelled from the club.)

This week, Tozen decided she'd had enough. She went to her local state MP, Kerr. He arranged for her to see McKay, whose task force is charged with rounding up "revenge attackers", the Middle Eastern men who attacked whites and their property after the race riots on December 11. McKay is trying to work out what happened. "There were a whole lot of incidents that day," he says. "It's a matter of establishing which event is related to which other one." McKay says he's trying to find the TV video but there is confusion about which channel the crew came from. One victim has been interviewed and a statement taken, McKay says. Another has been interviewed but does not want to pursue the attack. But no suspects have been interviewed let alone arrested.

So far, the Lebanese attackers have got away with it. Tozen is still as mad as hell. To her, it's just the latest of events that have been going on for years, in which Lebanese gangs have invaded her turf with impunity, bad-mouthing the locals, harassing and denigrating the women, sometimes starting fights.

But, as with a lot of the incidents McKay is trying to dissect, it's not always clean-cut. Inquirer this week tracked down one of the victims of the attack. Rather than present himself as an innocent bystander, the Cronulla local took pride in saying he started the whole thing. "That was the hottest Wednesday," says the victim, who did not give his name. "The lifesavers were attacked on the Sunday. I heard all the conflicting reports in the newspapers and radio. So I came down to the surf club and asked the lifesavers what happened.

"I was on my third longneck [beer] at that point, though I'm not trying to stress that now. I walked off and saw four Lebanese sitting on the park bench, they were being interviewed by a TV camera. As I walked past them I said 'f---ing Lebs' real loud, trying to get my voice on camera. I saw one of them calling his mates towards them. I got just past the lifesaving tower, next thing I know they all came past me and it was on. They were all over me. I reckon there was more like 15 than 20 of them. My mate was with me. He got kicked all the way from the point over to where the lifesaving club is. I got all the blokes off me, turned away and ran across the park. He was on the ground trying to get up and they were hitting and kicking him."

The long-entrenched Leftist loyalties of most Jews are badly letting them down now that the Left and the Islamic extremists are cosying up to one-another. Both the Left and the Islamofascists hate America so their alliance is understandable. And the Jew-hatred of the Islamists is increasingly being emulated as "anti-Zionism" among Leftists. But where does that leave mainstream Left-leaning Jews? In denial. They are completely tongue-tied on the matter. As we read:

"Amid pledges from Iran to "wipe Israel off the map" and to hold a conference examining whether the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews is a "myth," America's Holocaust Museum is under fire for its silence about Arab assistance to the Nazis during World War II, and about the intensifying hatred of Jews in the Arab Middle East today. Leading the charge is Holocaust Museum Watch, a national organization formed 18 months ago to spur the museum toward meaningful acknowledgment of Arab anti-Semitism....

But while calls for destroying the Jewish state have been the mainstay of the Arab Middle East for decades, critics say, the Holocaust Museum has not issued any "institutional scream," or even included exhibits or materials about Arab anti-Semitism in the museum's facilities. It has also declined repeated requests to hold conferences or events addressing the issue...

"It's unbelievable," the rabbi of the National Synagogue, Shmuel Herzfeld, told the Sun yesterday. "They won't talk about Egypt, about Syria, about Saudi Arabia - it's like the big elephant in the room."

A lot of German Jews in the 1930s just sat tight and hoped for the best while Hitler rose to power too. When will these kneejerk Leftists ever learn that denial just allows the problem to get worse? But Leftists always have been good at denying reality. They have to be. Reality is so uncomfortable for them. Tyler Cowen explains how painful it is for people to switch sides politically (it means you have admit to being wrong) but when being wrong leads to megadeaths (as it did under Hitler and as it will if Iran gets nukes and attacks Israel) it is gross indeed to persist in your folly. Being modern-day Neville Chamberlains is not clever.

Footnote:Yes. I DO know that those Jews who DID try to escape Hitler did not have an easy time of it. The failure of the rest of the world to accept Jewish refugees at that time does to a degree make the whole world complicit with the Holocaust. That any modern-day Jews are complicit with the threatened holocaust on Israel staggers me, however.

I am sure there will be more expert comments than mine forthcoming but I just want to point out what seem to me to be some of the more obvious implausibilities in the latest Australian research (GRE 2006) that reports a study of sea-levels from 1870 on. I reproduce the Abstract hereunder:

Multi-century sea-level records and climate models indicate an acceleration of sea-level rise, but no 20th century acceleration has previously been detected. A reconstruction of global sea level using tide-gauge data from 1950 to 2000 indicates a larger rate of rise after 1993 and other periods of rapid sea-level rise but no significant acceleration over this period. Here, we extend the reconstruction of global mean sea level back to 1870 and find a sea-level rise from January 1870 to December 2004 of 195 mm, a 20th century rate of sea-level rise of 1.7 ¤ 0.3 mm yr?1 and a significant acceleration of sea-level rise of 0.013 ¤ 0.006 mm yr?2. This acceleration is an important confirmation of climate change simulations which show an acceleration not previously observed. If this acceleration remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the IPCC TAR.

What we found is that sea levels are rising and increasing with time," the CSIRO study's co-author John Church said. "It means there will be increased flooding of low-lying areas when there are storm surges. "It means increased coastal erosion on sandy beaches. We're going to see increased flooding on island nations." ... Greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 50 per cent by 2050, Mr Church said. "If not, climate change will continue and increase in magnitude," he said.

By examining tidal data, Mr Church said sea levels rose by 19.5cm between 1870 and 2004. The increases accelerated with time, averaging 1.7mm a year in the 20th century and 1.8mm in the past 50 years. Mr Church said sea increases were previously based on climate change models. He said his team's research was the first to document rises based on extensive historical tidal data, allowing predictions on sea-level increases to be made with greater precision.

Many island nations are already feeling the impact of rising seas. In Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, increased sea levels have forced hundreds of islanders to abandon vulnerable coastal homes for higher ground, according to the United Nations and news reports.

So they report that sea levels have risen nearly eight inches between 1870 and now! That for a start seems to me to be a nonsense. Such a large rise in relatively recent times would surely have led to worldwide comments about what was once land now being swamped and I know of no such widespead comments or examples of flooding. Land does rise and fall for various reasons (e.g. in coastal California and Eastern England and perhaps the Maldives) but flooding due to sea-level rise has just not happened as far as I can see. And while sea-levels in some Pacific islands may have risen (though the Vanuatu claim is a fraud), in others the levels have fallen! (See here and here).

And how do Church et al. reconcile their "reconstruction" of sea-levels with the actual evidence provided by John Daly's `Isle of the Dead' (Tasmania), tide gauge from 1841 -- which shows a sea-level that is HIGHER than today? No doubt the actual 1841 observation was "wrong" and the modern reconstruction is "right"

In view of Church's obvious enthusiasm for global warming theory, we should also perhaps keep in mind this report:

When a trial of 908 volunteers found that using anti-inflammatory drugs could reduce the risk of mouth cancer, it caused considerable excitement among cancer researchers. The Harvard School of Dental Medicine described the study as impressive, claiming it might lead to earlier identification of pre-cancerous cells. Conducted by Dr Jon Sudbo, a previously-published researcher and cancer expert from the well-respected Radium Hospital in Oslo, Norway, the study was published in The Lancet, one of the world's most respected medical journals. So it came as a shock when revealed earlier this month that Sudbo's study was fiction, based on 908 patients who did not exist.

To make matters worse, the fraud was not discovered by The Lancet or his colleagues, but by Camilla Stoltenberg, a director of epidemiology at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo. Sudbo said the study was based on information collated from a public health database. Stoltenberg, responsible for the database, knew it did not contain the sort of information Sudbo cited. Confronted, Sudbo admitted he falsified the data. He also admitted that other studies on oral cancer, in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004 and The Journal of Clinical Oncology in March last year, were also fake.

The scandal comes less than a month after the Science retracted two papers by leading stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk after it was revealed he faked most of his ground-breaking work on cloning. The scams are by no means the only examples of fabricated research (see next page). However, the breathtaking nature of Sudbo's actions has raised questions about the effectiveness of peer review and journal editors' ability to identify misleading research.....

Professor Judy Black, chair of the National Health and Medical Research Council's research committee, agrees peer review has limitations. "When you get an article to review, you go on the data in front of you. You can look at the researcher's methods and see if you can detect differences between your methodology and theirs, but if two people do the same experiments and get different results, it doesn't mean one is fraudulent."

Black believes fraudulent research may also go unnoticed because peer reviewers and colleagues are reluctant to "dob in" fellow researchers. "People don't necessarily speak up about it. There is research that people know is fabricated, and they haven't dobbed the person in because everyone knows what happens to whistleblowers." However, Black says reviewers have no choice but to assume researchers' work is legitimate. "The onus is on the researcher to be honest and not falsify research."

Initial results from what might be the largest study of the practice of peer review ever conducted shows this faith may be misplaced. Three medical journals, The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the Annals of Internal Medicine, have allowed a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, to attend editorial meetings, look at reviewer comments and follow the progress of more than 1000 articles from submission to rejection or publication. The team hasn't released its final report, but initial findings indicate authors frequently fail to disclose funding sources and potential conflicts of interest in submitted manuscripts, until asked to do so by journal editors.

Black says the pressure to have work published in a high profile journal may tempt some researchers to take shortcuts with their research. "There's no doubt that being published in a high profile journal has a big impact. More and more people are going to be judged on their productivity and the number of studies they have published, and that determines funding. "If you get a research grant and if you have a lot of publications in high impact journals out of that grant, then your likelihood of getting another grant is increased." As a result, the competition to be published is intense....

Last year Richard Smith, editor of the BMJ for 25 years, wrote an editorial saying he suspected fraud "is probably happening on quite a large scale, and we just have inadequate mechanisms for sorting this out." Last year the US Office of Research Integrity, a federal agency responsible for investigating scientific misconduct, received 265 allegations of falsified research.

Michael Callaham, vice-president of the World Association of Medical Editors, says there is little anyone can do to eliminate fraud: "Journals could ask for all sorts of corroborating materials, but reviewers, who are mostly unpaid, and editors, who are mostly underpaid, would not be able to confirm their authenticity, and would not have the time to review them." ....

Jefferson says there is very little evidence that peer review is effective - a fact editors are reluctant to consider.... Jefferson says the medical publishing industry requires "radical change." "The first thing that needs to happen is that editors who maintain that peer review is infallible need to understand that, at best, it's untested. There are also far too many journals and some of them are publishing irrelevant or misleading research.

And despite the angst, research is still coming out in some of the world's leading scientific journals that should never have passed even the limited barriers of peer review. Note the summary below of the latest gem from The Lancet:

"Eating your greens will do more than please your mother: new evidence shows five servings of fruit and vegetables a day can slash your risk of having a stroke by 26 per cent. A review of previous studies, conducted by British and Australian experts, found that even eating between three to five 80g servings a day cut strokes by 11per cent, compared with people who ate fewer than three servings a day. The authors said that while a reduction in stroke from fruit and vegetable consumption was already known, this was the first time researchers had been able to quantify the benefit. The findings suggested that heeding recommendations on fruit and vegetable intake could save lives and prevent thousands of strokes a year.... Their review, published yesterday in The Lancet, looked at the results of eight previous studies that together involved more than 250,000 people who were followed up for an average of 13 years....

The study authors conceded their results might be affected by observational bias. People who ate a lot of fruit and vegetables were probably likely to share other characteristics known to reduce stroke risk - being less likely to smoke or be overweight, and more likely to exercise and to have lower intakes of salt and saturated fat.

The second paragraph as excerpted above shows, of course, that the study proves precisely nothing.

And I suppose that it is just too curmudgeonly of me altogether to point out that one third of what is published in even the most prestigious journals subsequently turns out to be wrong.

A presumption of innocence is the bedrock upon which Australia's judicial system is founded. The trial process is predicated on a requirement for sufficient proof to be gathered to prove, usually, beyond a reasonable doubt, that an accused is guilty of the crime. Recent reported comments from a NSW Justice seem to indicate that the concept of guilt of an accused is a foregone conclusion.

A Supreme Court judge has delivered a rebuke to the media and NSW government over new anti-riot laws, freeing a man who had previously been refused bail on charges of riot and affray. Justice Brian Sully said Mitchell John Newby, who was charged over the racial violence in Cronulla on December 11, would "not answer to a kangaroo court of the media or anyone else".

Justice Sully said he strongly objected to the "draconian form of incarceration" which Newby had to endure, being locked down in his Silverwater Prison cell for 22 hours a day. "Virtual solitary confinement is not something to be imposed upon a 20-year-old," he said. While stressing that his decision did not condone Newby's alleged actions, Justice Sully said the legislative amendments did not remove a person's right to bail. He accepted that Newby's alleged behaviour was out of character, and that he seemed to have been "caught up in the vortex" of a volatile situation. "In due course he will answer for what he has done," Justice Sully said.

I respectfully suggest, Your Worthless, that in due course he will face the court to be defended by a representative that will outline a case for his defence. The last thing the courts need is a justice pre-disposed to social engineering and against the concept of solitary confinement, waffling on about the chances of acquittal of an accused prior to trial. I wonder what age Justice Sully believes is suitable for solitary confinement? Whilst we are on the topic of judicial jackanapes, Australian Grand Poobah, Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court, is of the opinion that democratic policy is a wonderful thing, if taken out of the hands of the government and placed in the care of their intellectual superiors.

However, High Court Justice Michael Kirby made it clear recently that any challenge in Australia would be likely to fail. In a speech in December last year he said it seemed to him to be unjust to deprive prisoners of the vote.

"They have lost their liberty for a time; but they have not lost their dignity and basic human rights as citizens." Kirby added, "However, parliament can make such laws. There is nothing it seems that the courts can do about it."

If you take it upon yourself to act against societies laws, you should have your rights to elect the creator of those laws removed. If the will of the public is such that they endorse this position in the majority, that is to say, the elected government of the day creates and passes such a piece of legislation, there is not one scrap of evidence to suggest that a lone judge's personal view should be deemed any more important than the remainder. If Kirby wishes to constantly put himself onto the dissenters bench, he would be better served to raise his own political party and have his own policies and platforms, and not attempt to enforce his own views on the rest of society. Regardless of the level of judicial activism present on various benches around Australia, the only bodies who should be legally allowed to create laws are those elected, not appointed.

In response to Stephen Harper's news conference yesterday, University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman warned the Conservatives against "picking" old fights with the Liberals.

"It wears off after a while... Piling on is a penalty in football and politics," he said yesterday.

What a load of turkey feathers. Harper vowed to enact his Federal Accountability Act as part of his campaign platform. If even more Liberal discrepancies are uncovered is that "piling on"? There is still $40 million unaccounted for. Is holding the Liberals responsible for that "piling on"? Are we suddenly supposed to turn a blind eye to everything simply because the Liberals lost the election? I don't think so. There are still many questions which need answers and I want those answers. And I want those who engaged in criminal activities to be held accountable. Losing the election was only the first step. This is not over, not by a long shot. If that bothers you Mr.Wiseman than don't watch. It won't be pretty.

Yesterday Canada laid to rest one of its own, another victim in the war on terror. Although he was in the middle of one of the world's most dangerous spots he was not a soldier - he was a diplomat. And we was doing something he truly believed in.

Glyn Berry, 59 years of age, died Jan 15 when the armoured military convoy he traveled with fell prey to a suicide bomber. Three Canadian soldiers were also wounded, 2 of them critically.

Born in England, Berry had served with Canada's Foreign Affairs since 1977. He left the comfort of his New York office, the site of his then current assignment, to volunteer for duty in war-torn Afghanistan. He thought he could make a difference and to the people he came into contact with over there I'm sure he did. He had a burning desire to help and wasn't about to let danger stop him. From all I've been able to read about him this was the kind of man he was.

People who knew him described him as being a "wonderful storyteller" with an "infectious laugh". He made it a point to try to protect citizens when their own governments abandoned them.

At the time of his death Berry was serving as political director of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar. He was laid to rest with full military honours in his native England.

I have been studying and writing about Greenies for over 30 years and the thing that stands out most in them to me is their hysterical tone -- usually accompanied by vast exaggeration and selective attention. They are constantly issuing declarations of imminent doom -- none of which, of course, ever come to pass. The bet between Simon and Ehrlich is of course the classic instance of that. At the moment, the chief Greenie doomster appears to be James Lovelock -- whose predictions are so extreme that you would have to have a religious need for panic in order to take them seriously. I have of course recorded quite a few potshots at Lovelock's absurdities on Greenie Watch in recent weeks.

It seems of interest, however, to point out that scaremongering is not confined to the Greenies. It is a trait general to Leftists. People of all political stripes support environmental causes. I support some myself (prevention of soil erosion, for instance). But there is no doubt that Greenie activists and Leftist activists have a lot in common these days and are often allied. So the following examples of extreme doom-mongering from a Leftist source should come as no surprise. It is excerpted from Taranto and the sting definitely is in the tail.

This Usenet posting, from one Moussaoui C. Abdenacer, will seem unremarkable, but bear with us (quoting verbatim):

George Bush's whole administration has all the earmarks of a well prepared nazi-type regime! They are working on it tooth and claw! The only thing they need now is an internal terrorist threat, or civil disorder growing from anti-war protests to justify declaring a National Emergency with its protests to justify declaring a National Emergency with its legally sanctioned suspension of Constitutionally protected rights. Concentration camps for hard-core anti-war activists will be supported by the stupidity silent majority with their brainless, moronic, imbecilic, blind and bigoted moral retardation. Hence idiotic flag-waving becomes a substitute for rational analysis, and Jerry Falwell Bible Thumping a means of conditioning the rah rah war crowd to perceive anti-war protestors as low-life scum and traitors who need to be locked up or shot by loyal, awesomely patriotic volunteers like Marino Sicki of Arch-hate-a, Calif. who has publicly proclaimed his desire to kill protestors.

So I have a feeling that by this Spring civil unrest and economic turmoil will exacerbate domestic problems sufficiently to permit administrative type detention policies to be implemented by the Tyrant Bush with the complete support of all war-loving red, white, and blue American zombies. This demented hard-hat mental disease was prevalent during the Vietnam war era and those that don't learn from history eventually get a rude awakening. The economy is going to be so bad: the whole situation is going to be so bad; more oppressive measures will be imposed. They're already establishing special camps for those deemed a threat to national determination of your subversive potential rather than on any overt acts you may have committed.

OK wait, one more and then we'll get to the point. This is from Rick Burgess:

Impeach George Bush! Call your Congressperson and demand it!

How much more blatant and obvious does the information have to be? We've got a President who very obviously came into power under very corrupt circumstances. . . . This is not just another Republican administration run amuck! Impeach George Bush Now!

What's interesting is the dates on which these ravings were posted: Abdenacer's was on Feb.17, 1991, and Burgess's on April 19, 1991. Yes, they were talking about the first President Bush. Well, plus la change

.

Similar Bush=Nazi shrieks are of course regularly heard from Leftists all the time these days but it is amusing to look back and see that such shrieks have been with us for a long time. And if the past shrieks have been shown by events to have been false prophecies, it should be yet another reason to believe that the present shrieks are false prophecies too.

They are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Community relations were better before they came along

Miranda Devine has an interesting article pointing out that even Australian left liberals are now airing doubts about multiculturalism's ugly side. She points out how recently Philip Adams interviewed Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, the man often credited with being the intellectual architect of Australia's multiculturalism policy.

"Zubrzycki told Adams the Cronulla riots were a "wake-up call" for multiculturalism. They illustrated the folly of dumping poor, unskilled migrants from Lebanon in the outer suburbs of Sydney in the 1980s, "on the understanding they would be looked after by their families . We left them to their own devices, with no specific settlement policy, traumatised [by civil war], unable to speak the language, unable to come to grips with Australian culture and also largely of the Islamic faith" ."

So the answer to multiculturalism's failures is even more multicultural bureaucracy. Isn't this like a losing General demanding he be sent more troops? My guess is that both Adams and Zubrzycki would (as I do) regard Australia's post WW2 immigration as successful. Yet the hundreds of thousands who came to our shores in the two decades after WW2, many of whom experienced devastation and wartime traumas, at least as bad as anything seen in Lebanon, had far fewer government provided services than immigrants and refugees who have arrived in recent decades. Many post-WW2 refugee immigrants to Australia ended up in Displaced Persons camps and had to spend two years living in amenity poor tent cities, with dozens of nationalities thrown together, more or less at random, working with pick and shovel before being released into the general community. Once released they had no translator services, no high profile community advocates on TV every night, and anti-discrimination laws were decades away. Hard work was really their only option. Still they survived and thrived. The immigrant groups who have come since the 1990s have, comparatively speaking, had it easy.

The pundits also ignore the comparative add-on costs between the two generations of immigrants and it's impact in promoting anti-immigration sentiment in the wider community. In the 1940s-1960s immigrants had a much lower government spending price tag per capita, even in relative terms, than in the 1990s-2000s. As such it shouldn't be surprising to learn that polls show popular opposition to the immigration program was much lower in the earlier period. Despite Australian society in the 1990s being considered much more diverse and 'tolerant' than the "White Australia" of the 1950s.

Trickle down arguments about modern immigrants 'paying their own way' may be correct in a textbook economics sense but are irrelevant in this particular case. If modern immigrants manage to 'pay their own way', the earlier generation must have been a bargain. The pundits also fail to explain why there were no "anti-immigrant" riots among the former generation of anglophile-educated Australians. No liberal pundits have even noticed that the participants in the Cronulla riot were actually from the first generation of Australians with pro-multicultural schooling from their first day of kindergaten. We know that three generations of Communist propaganda failed to turn the Russians into true believer marxists. Even though in the Soviet era all learned to mouth the phrases as required. Perhaps a similar situation impacts the doctrine of multiculturalism. Zubrzycki's solution would undoubtedly exacerbate tensions not relieve them.

... there is a particularly poisonous Leftist site here that seems to be enamoured of the egregious Prof. Ward Churchill. They seem impressed that Churchill is popular with his students. The fact that con-men are usually popular is not mentioned. There is a systematic dismantling of some of their deceptions about Churchill here

produced the predictable vituperative response. Pure abuse. Nothing to reply to there at all. But I think we can safely take it that their admission "And, Yes, It Is Hatred That Warms Our Heart" is a sincere one. I discuss the central role of hate in Leftist psychology at some length here.

Several people have emailed me to suggest that "Tryworks" (should that be "Tryhard"?) is in fact all written by the contemptible Ward Churchill himself under various pseudonyms. That a hate-filled Ward Churchill should write a hate-filled blog certainly sounds reasonable so if anyone is up-to-date with textual analysis techniques that could be an interesting line of enquiry. My own interest in Churchill is minimal, however. Jim Paine, John Rubery and the American Indian Movement do a pretty good job of keeping him pinned down.

Update:

My goodness! My derisive comments above have had a most unexpected result. I actually stimulated them to temporary politeness! What I said must have really hit home. I reproduce here an email I recently received from their "John Moredock" (a.k.a. Ward Churchill?). I reproduce it as an out-of-character curiosity, not because I accept any of the assertions in it. Being polite was obviously painful for them, however, as they shortly thereafter reproduced the missive concerned on their own site, accompanied by their usual vitriol.

On a side note, does this mean - officially - that leftists have to stop saying that in Islam, terrorists and their supporters are a "small minority of extremists"?

Because this outcome would kinda prove that I've been right all along.

Update: You know, the more I think about this, the more I’m convinced that this is actually a good turn of events.

The longer Islamic terrorists stayed away from politics, the longer western liberals could claim that they are not representative of the populations who shelter and support them.

If, through elections, they form governments, we will be able to wage war against the nations themselves. We will be able to crush Islamism the way we crushed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

No more worrying about the caution we had to employ in fighting opponents engaging us in assymetrical warfare. The civilian populace has given Hamas a mandate. If Hamas now proceeds to attack, we can legitimately crush them both. I know that sounds harsh, but it's just the reality of history. Vicious ideologies are not some kind of disembodied entity, which people can disavow when it suits them.

We held the populations of Germany and Japan to account for the deeds of their governments, we must do the same for the Middle East, if this war is to be won, and won decisively.

More immediately, I am curious to know what the reaction of Israel will be. I think it will be an excellent indicator as to how this senario will play out. Either way, surely both parties will now have to recognise that pulling out of Gaza and dismantling the settlements was a terrible, terrible mistake. The Palestinian ability to wage war has only be greatly enhanced by Israel's efforts toward peace. They can now co-ordinate far better and they control the border with Egypt, through which they can secure direct logistical support, both in terms of supply and reinforcement.

Never, never appease aggression. It only encourages and emboldens the aggressor. The fall of Gaza was, to the great unwashed Palestinian masses, not an indication of Israel's benevolence, but of Hamas' strength.

It was proof positive that terrorism works. Will they renounce it now? Hell no.

A university Christian Union has been suspended and had its bank account frozen after refusing to open its membership to people of all religions. The Christian Union, an evangelical student organisation, has instructed lawyers and is threatening court proceedings against the Birmingham Guild of Students. The Birmingham Christian Union has more than 100 members who attend meetings regularly and has been functioning at the university for 76 years.

Members claim the actions have been taken against them after they refused on religious grounds to make “politically correct” changes to their charitable constitution, including explicitly mentioning people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. The Christian Union was advised that the use of the words “men” and “women” in the constitution were causing concern because they could be seen as excluding transsexual and transgendered people.

Difficulties arose after the organisation Christians in Sport, whose supporters include Jonathan Edwards, the Olympic gold medallist, attempted to book a room in the name of the Christian Union. After checking the union’s constitution, the Guild of Students objected to a number of clauses. Andy Weatherley, Christian Union staff worker in Birmingham, said: “The guild insists the Christian Union constitution must be amended to include mandatory clauses, insisting on more control by the guild and open membership to those who would not call themselves Christians.”

At a recent guild meeting Matthew Crouch, of the Christian Union, appealed against derecognition. He said: “All guild members can attend our meeting but only members can vote,” but Stuart Mathers, a guild vice-president, said that all student groups have to follow guild council policy. Birmingham University Christian Union is affiliated to the University and Colleges’ Christian Fellowship. Pod Bhogal, its communications director, said: “We support the Birmingham Christian Union. We would not dream of telling a Muslim group or a political society how to elect their leaders or who could or could not become a member. The same applies to a Christian Union

More fallout from the closure of emergency services at Caboolture hospital

A fire crew was dispatched to give urgent first aid to a Bribie Island man who had a heart attack because ambulances were busy transporting patients away from the troubled Caboolture Hospital. Fire officers gave oxygen for almost 1 1/2 hours to retired NSW police officer John Kenny, 57, until an ambulance was available. As well as having to wait for an ambulance, Mr Kenny was diverted away from Caboolture Hospital's emergency department which normally would have treated heart attack victims in the area.

A Queensland Ambulance Service spokesman last night confirmed a fire truck had been sent to Mr Kenny because it was "an unusually busy night". He denied ambulance crews had been busy diverting patients from the Caboolture Hospital. "Every available crew in the area were on a code-one emergency response," he said. "It was just an unusually busy period at that stage. "We responded with a firefighting crew who all have advance first-aid and lifesaving equipment on their trucks. "While it doesn't happen very often, we do have a standing agreement with the fire service to do this sort of thing. They are a great back-up. It is better having someone with advanced first-aid and life-saving equipment than no one at all." The spokesman said that at all times ambulance officers were in contact with Mr Kenny and the fire officers treating him.

Mr Kenny said he telephoned for the ambulance at 3am on Saturday and was shocked 10 minutes later to hear a fire engine siren outside and four fire officers walking into his home. "They put me on some oxygen and said there were no ambulances available," Mr Kenny said last night. "I didn't believe it. I thought someone was playing a bad joke on me. It took an ambulance an hour and a half to get there. "In the end an ambulance came from Caboolture station. They said they were spending all their time running people around the place because there is no Caboolture Hospital."

Mr Kenny has been in Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital waiting for an angiogram since Saturday morning. He said the person he was sharing his room with had been waiting for most of that time for a 10-minute stress test which he was unlikely to get before Friday. "I moved here seven years ago and I remember (Premier) Peter Beattie saying we've got the best hospital system in the world. It's world-class," Mr Kenny said. "It might have been then, but, by God, it's not now. "You can give the firies and the ambos a real wrap. But you can give the people running the place -- the State Government -- the thumbs-down."

A spokeswoman for Mr Beattie said last night the Premier was unable to comment until he had been briefed on the circumstances. Opposition health spokesman Bruce Flegg said the incident showed other emergency services were being drawn into the problems confronting the state's public health system. "Heart attack carries with it a very high risk of sudden death," Dr Flegg said. "Failing to dispatch the properly equipped ambulance and paramedics increases the risk the patient will not survive." He said the failure to send an ambulance was compounded by the fact that the nearest hospital, Caboolture, was not taking patients such as Mr Kenny.

I noticed the paper by Raper and Braithwaite in which the authors come to the conclusion that the projected "sea level rise due to melting of mountain glaciers and icecaps to be 0.046 and 0.051 m by 2100, about half that of previous projections."

Half as bad as predicted - well, that's good news to anyone concerned about the potential impact of rising sea levels. So what do the editors of Nature decide to do with this piece of good news? They decide to undermine the paper as much as they can. Instead of writing up a feature or news story about their own paper, they publish an online story about a paper published in GRL that essentially contradicts their own authors.

The GRL authors say "the acceleration they have detected since 1870 matches up nicely with model predictions: if the acceleration continues as expected, by 2100 the seas will lap the shore about 31 centimetres higher, on average, than they did in 1990. That matches what has been forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

So, there you have it: An anti-alarmist paper published in Nature on Jan 19 estimates that global average sea-level rise due melting glaciers and icecaps by 2100 will be just 0.05 m (or half of what previous models have predicted) - accompanied by a news story on Nature's website that claims that sea-level rise is accelerating, a finding that "matches what has been forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Nature's news service highlighted the IPCC-confirming GRL paper while it failed to even mention the model-revising paper in the same Jan 19 issue. It would have been prudent for Nature to provide a balanced report on the two conflicting papers. Needless to say that the claim of an accelerating global sea-level is highly contentious.

Mojtaba Saminejad is an Iranian blogger. Mojtaba Saminejad is in an Iranian prison for blogging. Incarcerated since February 2005 the 25-year-old university student was arrested for what authorities called "insulting the Supreme Guide". What was his crime? This is an excerpt from his blog,

Mojtaba SamieNejad, 25 year old blogger and student, was first arrested on November 1, 2004 for reporting the arrests of three other bloggers. He was held in custody for almost three months. Following his temporary release on January 27, 2005, he started a new blog to reflect his thoughts and beliefs. This resulted in a second unlawful arrest which has lasted to this day.

Mojtaba is kept in Ghezel Hesar prison amongst inmates convicted of murder and other serious offences. Mojtaba was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment on June 2, 2005. This sentence was issued by Judge Saadat of Revolutionary Court 13.

It is ours' and all human rights activists' duty to take a stand against the injustice of imprisonment for voicing one's opinion. We ask all bloggers, human rights organizations and free people of the world to help Mojtaba by voicing their objection to his sentencing and demand his immediate and unconditional release.

At least they are allowing him to continue with his studies although he attends school wearing handcuffs.

There isn't much we here in the west can do about this travesty other than try to publicize it as much as possible. Things like this sure makes a person think. Perhaps we take our freedoms and privileges for granted at times, particularly those of us with political blogs. It's only human nature. We sit here day after day typing away at the keyboard putting up new content nary giving it a second thought. But news like this sure shakes you back to reality.

This day, our national day, commemorates the first fleet's arrival at Sydney Cove in 1788 to form a colony; a colony that would eventually become the Commonwealth of Australia.

Until the Commonwealth was formed, Australia used Britain's flag, the Union Jack. When the competition was held to design Australia’s own flag, five designs shared the prize due to the similarities of their designs.

In the top left hand corner the Union Jack remains to this day. The Union Jack shows Australia is part of the British Commonwealth. More importantly, it also recognises the tremendous legacy of law and democracy bequeathed to us by that great nation.

The large white star beneath the Union Jack represents the six states and the territories.

To the right are the stars of the Southern Cross, chosen because it can always be seen in the Australian sky at night.

I’m proud of our flag. I’m tremendously proud of our nation and what we have achieved.

Three weeks ago Waverley Council was accused of banning the Australian flag. Now it seems it cannot get enough of it. To show that the national flag is welcome in Bondi, the council will fly it from flag poles on Campbell Parade on Australia Day - and if residents approve, the flag could fly over the beachfront permanently. The council also plans to hold a flag-raising ceremony at its chambers on Australia Day and to hand out flags to participants in its citizenship ceremony. But the Mayor of Waverley, Mora Main, denied that the council had backed down on its decision last month not to erect new poles and fly the flag on the Bondi Pavilion. "It's really more about trying to sell the fact that there is not a ban and there never has been." Under the plan announced yesterday, Aboriginal, NSW and Torres Strait Island flags will also be raised on Campbell Parade to mark Australia Day. Cr Main said the council, at its meeting next month, would consider whether to fly the four flags permanently. She said the proposal by a Liberal councillor, Joy Clayton, to erect flag poles on the pavilion was rejected because of concerns about concrete cancer.

Last year was the warmest in a century, nosing out 1998, a federal analysis concludes. Researchers calculated that 2005 produced the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The result confirms a prediction the institute made in December. In a telephone interview, Hansen said the analysis estimated temperatures in the Arctic from nearby weather stations because no direct data were available. Because of that, "we couldn't say with 100 percent certainty that it's the warmest year, but I'm reasonably confident that it was," Hansen said. More important, he said, is that 2005 reached the warmth of 1998 without help of the "El Nino of the century" that pushed temperatures up in 1998. Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed a bit more than 1 degree in total, making it about the warmest it's been in 10,000 years, Hansen said. He blamed a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Jay Lawrimore of the federal government's National Climatic Data Center said his own center's current data suggest 2005 came in a close second to 1998, in part because of how the Arctic was factored in. But he said a forthcoming analysis "will likely show that 2005 is slightly warmer than 1998."

I enjoyed the haggis I had on my Burns Night. Attacking a central part of the Scottish heritage is certainly not wise. The Scots are very proud of their heritage

Scotland's national dish, haggis, has become the latest foodstuff to be targeted as part of a drive to combat growing levels of obesity among British children, prompting outrage among producers. According to health officials in Scotland, the delicacy -- a sheep's stomach lining stuffed with offal, oatmeal, onions and seasoning -- contains too much fat and salt and should only be given to youngsters once a week.

But the guidance has angered makers of the "love it or hate it" foodstuff, which is traditionally eaten with a tot of whisky on Burn's Night, the annual January 25 celebration of the life of the legendary Scots poet Robert Burns. "With good neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes), there's nothing more nutritious than haggis," said Alan Pirie, of butchers James Pirie and Son, the current holders of the sought-after title "Scottish Haggis Master". "It's made of all natural ingredients -- there's no rubbish in it at all. To compare it with processed meat like chicken nuggets or hot dogs is just ridiculous. It's a big knock for us for it to be compared to those."

Haggis was placed on a "restricted" list of foods issued to nurseries, playgroups and childminders as part of a drive by the Scottish Executive in Edinburgh to improve the health of pre-school children under five. The numbers of obese children in Scotland is twice the British average; 20 percent of three-and-a-half-year-olds were overweight, 8.6 percent obese and four percent severely obese in the 2004-05 school year, official statistics show. Mortality rates among adults, particularly in the densely populated "Central Belt" between Glasgow, in the west, and Edinburgh, in the east, are also among the highest in Europe, mainly through alcohol, smoking and a high-fat diet.

The Scottish Executive, which has made a number of moves to improve the nation's health, including an imminent ban on smoking in public places, insisted haggis was not being outlawed but should be eaten in moderation. "The nutritional guidelines are intended to give advice on how to provide a balanced diet over a week," said a spokeswoman. Preventing an obesity epidemic in Britain has been the subject of a number of government initiatives in recent years, including improving school dinners in England and Wales with the help of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

Was anybody surprised by Paul Martin's announcement that he is leaving politics? You shouldn't be. I wasn't. I had a sneaking suspicion he would do this if he lost the election. My suspicions were further aroused when that clip of him playing cards with his family was aired. Rather than watching the incoming election results, Martin sat with his back to the television screen and concentrated on the game he was playing with his family. I don't think he did that out of arrogance. I think the writing was on the wall and he saw it.

Why did I suspect he would step down if defeated? Elementary my dear Watson. Martin inherited a majority government from Jean Chretien. He then turned that majority in to a minority in 2004 and then from there Her Majesty's Official Opposition. Not exactly a stellar resume highlight kids. Then there is the little matter of that nasty and quite public power struggle between Chretien and himself which deeply divided the Liberal Party. In fact they still haven't come to terms with it and suspect they won't for some time yet. There remains a lot of bitterness in the party and feelings of resentment towards Martin despite his best efforts to purge the party of the Chretien loyalists. Martin had no choice but to leave. I'm certain that had he not made the decision to do so of his own accord he would have had a "helping" hand.

Of course stepping down is also the honourable thing to do considering the scandals that have plagued his administration. I don't know for sure that he participated in, or had personal knowledge of, any of those scandals but as Prime Minister he is ultimately responsible.

Having said that I would like to set aside partisan politics for a moment and thank Martin for his service to Canada. Political life is not an easy one. It is often a cutthroat business and a thankless job. It takes a special kind of person to enter public service and he was in it for the long haul. Paul Martin didn't have to work - he is a multi-millionaire. Whatever your opinion is of the man or his beliefs one cannot dispute his dedicated service to this country.

With that we close the book on this chapter in Canadian history and look to the future. And with the Conservatives leading the way it looks awfully bright from where I'm sitting.

One thing we constantly whining, unsatisfiable conservatives often complain about is the way that the liberal media fudges the truth or is selective about which part of the truth it includes and which parts it omits.

But there is another clever way that clever leftist news organizations sneak their bias in under our noses. I call it "balancing the balance".

In short, this is what I'm talking about. Occasionally, really, really biased news groups, like the BBC in the UK, for instance, is forced to make an act of contrition after being caught out in yet another egregious example of blatant dishonesty or one-sidedness.

So they'll write a token article in which the views of people like myself are addressed. Not agreed with, mind you, just addressed. It is the journalistic equivalent of a person walking past you and nodding their head at you in a vaguely interested way. It is an acknowledgement that you are present and nothing more.

Of course, the act of doing this is painful to the ideologues who staff the BBC, so what they'll do is find a way to balance this terrible rightward shift in 'perception management' (propaganda). They'll place a link, either in the article itself, or in the sidebar, to a much more helpful article which will set you straight on all of the disquieting facts you might have encountered in the article which mentioned the conservative point of view.

What turns a devout young Muslim woman into one of Islam's most outspoken critics?

For the Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it was a long journey that started with an arranged marriage.

She sought refuge in the Netherlands on her way to her new husband's home in Canada.

"I wanted a chance at a life where I could shape my own future," she says.

"I knew the risks - being disowned or being shunned by my father and the rest of my family. I took those risks and I don't regret it."

Hirsi Ali describes the anti-US attacks of 11 September 2001 as pivotal to her questioning of Islam.

She remembers the moment when she realised that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers, had studied the Koran, like her, in the mid-1980s.

She says: "I grabbed the Koran and I started to read what Bin Laden had written and... I put (his) citations next to what is written in the Koran and I realised that, yes, a lot of it is part of my religion and what do I think of that?"

The article continues, and is worth reading. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a woman whose integrity and courage is unchallengable.

Once you have finished reading the article, take a look at the right-hand sidebar.

When I saw that, I wondered, "Does the BBC have an equivalent "laptop link up" exploring Christianity and/or Judaism?"

As it happens, they don't. But let's move on.

Underneath that link to the laptop extravaganza of Islam (produced courtesy of British BBC ratepayers funds, no doubt) are lots more articles, featuring lots more young, fresh-faced, smiling Muslims talking a lot about intolerance and racism.

That's European intolerance and racism. Not the intolerance that led to Theo van Gogh's death. Not the intolerance which is forcing Ayaan Hirsi Ali to permanently remain under police protection.

On and on and on it goes. Here are the other articles. You can see the point being bludgeoned into us just from the pandering titles themselves. But being a nice guy, I'll read and summarize them for you.

Summary: Two young Islamic men bitch about how awful Europe is to them. Apparently, the British and French born children of Islamic parents are so upset by the racism of Britons and Frenchmen that they need to burn cars to cinders and pack rape white women. The only solution is more money and affirmative action programs.

Money quote: "I'm 21 years old and I studied psychology in one of the few universities based in the suburbs outside Paris. I'm French Egyptian and I have lived in Clichy Sur Bois for more than 10 years.

For the last four weeks the image of the suburb has been changing because of two events which have been considered as unjust. Two young boys died running away from the police and people have expressed anger over this. Some with violence. Two days later, the situation calmed down because people called for calm.

But then one of the mosques in Clichy was attacked, several hundred worshippers were inside at the time praying during the holy month of Ramadan.

Again people were angry against the police -and again there was violence."

Why is that a money quote? Because it is a fabrication which was obviously not fact-checked by the BBC. There is no record whatsoever of any attack being made on any Mosque in Clichy prior to the mass burnings, or afterward.

The cause of the riot was two Muslim youths who fled from a police ID check and incinerated themselves after illegally entering a power station. Not police brutality, but death by misadventure (and break and enter).

In response, the Muslims of Clichy rose in revolt.

Can you recall the last time non-Muslims killed themselves stupidly, and their fellow non-Muslims revolted?

Sometime around the middle ages, I would think.

The fact was, the death of the kids was an excuse. A pretext. Nothing more.

Summary: Several young Muslim women bleat about how they are misunderstood, and how they adore the feel of the yoke of Islam being tenderly placed down upon their necks.

Money quote: "Yes I agree with you completely. If you look back over history there are so many Muslim women that were involved in all sorts of businesses and scholarly activities, dating back to the time of the Prophet."

She seems reluctant to cite the name of any.

Perhaps she is referring to the child bride of Muhammed, whom he slept with before she entered her teenage years.

Summary: What turned an apparently integrated, happy, western-thinking man into a terrorist monster? Western intolerance of Islam, obviously.

Money quote: [On one of the British train bombers] "Khan was, by all accounts, an exceptionally well integrated person. His anglicised name "Sid" was just one symbol of his willingness to take on a British identity."

Summary: Yeah, so some Muslims supposedly attacked and killed a bunch of innocent civilians. But we should be far, far more worried about the Europeans who will now turn around and massacre Muslims in the streets.

Money quote: [Paragraph 1 of the article] "So-called faith hate crimes increased sharply after the 7 July attacks, according to a report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism (EUMC)."

Huh? I know you guys are biased, but introducing an unrelated side issue of which leftists are inordinately fond is pushing things just a little too far.

Summary: I know we've had nothing but 'articles' which gave the floor entirely over to Muslims complaining about how awful Europeans are to them, but we thought we'd add another one, just in case you've not been sufficiently browbeaten toward our perspective yet.

Money quote: "Whenever anyone has an issue with Muslims and Islam, I think this: 'Look to the people not the rel igion'. Why? Because God and His Book are flawless. It is us who are imperfect."

"As for those of your women who are guilty of lewdness, call to witness four of you against them. And if they testify (to the truth of the allegation) then confine them to the houses until death take them or (until) Allah appoint for them a way (through new legislation)." (Let adulterous women starve to death. If they're not actually adulterous, find a few women who hate them to say they are).

"And if ye fear that ye will not deal fairly by the orphans, marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice (to so many) then one (only) or (the captives) that your right hands possess. Thus it is more likely that ye will not do injustice." (Marry as many women as you like, dude.)

"Lo! Those who disbelieve Our revelations, We shall expose them to the Fire. As often as their skins are consumed We shall exchange them for fresh skins that they may taste the torment. Lo! Allah is ever Mighty, Wise." (And kind, too. Don't piss Allah off, non-Muslims. Convert today!)

Summary: The title says all you need to know. Allow yourself to get caught up in petty distractions, forget the bombings, it's no big deal. Oh, and withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. Fast.

Money quote: "The withdrawal of Spain's troops from Iraq helped a lot of people to feel safer and no longer such a prominent target for international attacks."

Transplant that comment to another time and another war:

"The abandonment of the British Commonwealth/French/Polish alliance, the disbanding of the Home Guard and the scrapping of the British Navy helped a lot of people to feel safer and no longer such a prominent target for German attacks."

Summary: The Dutch have lost all of their wonderful European tolerance and are, for some reason, all concerned over "security" and "integration".

Money quote:"There were six ladies who wore the niqab. I think two or three weeks after the council passed this law, five have dropped it," says Mr Creemers. "One lady is still wearing it but the last step in the procedure will be that she must go to jail."

The husband of the woman who defies the ban is being held in connection with the Madrid bombings.

But the police here are not too happy with the ban. They say it has made relations with the Moroccan community worse and gives young people a reason to resent society."

Resent western society. How dare we forbid those Madrid bombers to keep their wive(s) in servitude!

Summary: Poor Muslims who never learned to speak or read French can't get jobs, can't afford decent housing and prefer to instead live in packed state-provided slums.

I blame whitey. So does the BBC.

Money quote: "Blighted by bad schools and endemic unemployment, the suburbs are hard to escape."

My heart bleeds. Thank God the white settlers of America didn't have to fight for the land they settled in, and were provided with excellent educational facilities and jobs by the Indians and Spaniards who welcomed them to the new world. They might never have made anything of themselves, otherwise.

Summary: When not slaughtering innocent civilians in theatres or children in schools, the Muslims of Russia are super cool and really secularly minded. Honest.

Money quote:"The country's Muslim community makes up more than 10% of the total population. Demographers predict that by 2020 one out of five Russians will be Muslim. But the question is: How Muslim will they be?"

Be careful, Beeb guy. Your bosses don't like those kinds of "thoughtful" questions.

The "have your say" section was just gravy, for me. Every single article above it had been an exercise in slavish adulation of Islam, written almost exclusively by Muslims, and now, at the very end, Muslims were being invited to add MORE of their views to the Muslim views which had been labouriously, repeatedly and UNCRITICALLY parroted by the BBC journalists.

Talk about laying it on thick. Could the page be any more balanced without tipping over leftwards?

So, the final tally? On one page - ostensibly devoted to a woman who is a critic of Islam - we have her views 'balanced' with links to at least a hundred contrary views, put forward by Muslims.

Of course, I could be wrong about this. It could be that, everytime the Beeb hosts an article which portrays Christianity in a bad light, they do the same 'balancing' trick with the sidebar there, too. Let's take a look.

About

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists. The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Some brief observations about Leftism

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!) If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left.

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among people who should know better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

You can email me (John Ray) here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)